Healing Journal #1 - The Bus Driver
TL;DR: I’m beginning to process my CPTSD through writing. This first story revisits a childhood experience with a bus driver who abused her authority, and how those small, repeated moments of power and humiliation stayed with me for years. Writing about it is my way of acknowledging the harm and finally letting it go.
I stopped being part of the world the day I posted that I was taking time off around the holidays to be with family and friends. [Dec. 19, 2025] I was burnt out, emotionally depleted, and in desperate need of a breather. November and December are harder months for me, partially because of seasonal depression, but more so recently because it is connected with me first facing my burnout and trauma. Christmas 2022 I admitted to my mom that I did not want to live anymore. I just blurted it out, sitting on the loveseat with my husband, and my family around after we had opened gifts. It was the first time that I was able to put words to how I had been feeling. In one way it felt like relief, because I was being honest with the people I love the most, but also because I was finally being honest with myself.
I had experienced traumas working at the library that no one should ever have to face. It was made harder by the fact that Jason and I had just used all of our savings to move into a house. A house felt so permanent. Don’t get me wrong I love our house, and the ability to have been able to purchase it, but it also caused very real negative emotions and homesickness for me. I was living in a state away from my entire family. My nieces were growing up without really knowing me, and my job was literal hell on earth.
I didn’t know it then, but that would cause a long journey of healing trauma that I had not only experienced recently, but buried traumas resurfacing from over the years, through therapy. The more I opened up in therapy the worse I felt. I would have to take weeks, sometimes months, off work just to rest and heal. It was so hard to try to be a functioning human while also facing some really ugly demons. The truth is, I will have to work every day to overcome what I have been through. This blog post is not to gain sympathy or to call out those that I feel wronged by. I just want to work through this, and writing is the only way I know how to just get it out of me.
In order to do that I feel like I need to write about my experiences, tell my story and just get it out of me so that I can begin to heal and live my life. I don’t want to hold onto this anymore. I also want to bring awareness to CPTSD, and what that looks like as far as I can speak to it. I cannot speak to how others heal or deal with their trauma, and I don’t presume to be the guru on it either. I am simply doing something my therapist suggested. Working through this in a safe way that feels therapeutic to me; through writing.
Today I want to talk about my bus driver. She was not necessarily my earliest abuser, but she’s the one that has been surfacing recently. Out of respect for her and her family I will not use her real name, I will instead call her Trudy. Because my trauma response has been mostly memory loss, I cannot tell you exactly when Trudy started driving our bus. (I will fact check with my mom as much as I possibly can) I just know I was young, likely in elementary school. My brother and I had to ride the bus because both of our parents worked, and we lived 20~ minutes from our school. Because we were so far out in the county that meant we were the first kids picked up. I believe we got on the bus around 6:30 am. (Mom could not come up with an exact time either, but she confirmed it was really early because we were first on) A lot of times me and my brother would have toaster strudels or hot pockets as we ran down our driveway to catch the bus. This might not seem like too big of a deal, but Trudy wouldn’t let us eat on the bus. It is still dark outside. We are children.
My favorite thing to do would be to listen to my CD player, put my knees up on the seat in front of me, and try to sleep a little before the bus filled up and it got loud. She would demand that I sit up in the seat, meanwhile being lenient on other kids. I felt singled out a lot, and I know she singled my brother out as well. She would not allow us to eat or drink on the bus, and we could not chew gum. I know this is because she didn’t want to clean up after us, but she had never given us the chance. I would understand more if the rules were not there and then we left a mess on multiple occasions and then she started the rule. However, she set those rules at the beginning but inconsistently dolled out punishments.
What I mean is that me and my brother would get in trouble for small infractions like the ones aforementioned when there were kids that were breaking the same rules, and oftentimes behaving worse: hitting each other, jumping from seat to seat, yelling, and getting away with it. I just really quickly began to hate riding the bus. I was not a disrespectful kid, while my brother would often talk back, I would not. I’m not saying I blame my brother, just that he has always been more outspoken when it comes to that sort of thing. I, on the other hand, was scared of authority figures, and tried to adapt my behavior so that I was seen as good and not a problem child.
As we got older, it got worse and worse. She would single us out for things other kids were doing. She would force us to move to the front of the bus after having done nothing. Just because she could. She was in a small power role over us, and man did she abuse that power. I just wanted to be left alone and taken home as quickly as possible. However, because we were the first picked up, we were the last dropped off.
The fact is there were several other groups of kids that lived on our road that also rode the bus with us. All of us got on and off the bus on the same side of the street. She would go past all of us in the morning, turn the bus around and on her way back pick up me and my brother. On several occasions she kept driving past us as we were walking down the driveway. She claimed it was because we had to be at the bottom of our driveway at a certain time, but we were not late. Oftentimes she would be early, taking us off guard and causing us to run down the driveway before she could get turned around.
On one occasion when she passed us up, my brother had run down the driveway, and I was at the midpoint of our driveway, so I know you could see me from a distance but she kept going. I just stopped walking and I remember my stomach dropping. I knew we would have to wake my mom up to take us to school. At the time she worked second shift, so she would wake us up and go back to sleep. It was our responsibility to get on the bus on time. I would usually stand at the front door looking for the lights as she drove past our driveway in order for us to get down the hill on time. That morning she left us. I did not want to wake up my mom. I did not want to bother her, because I knew it would be me that would get in trouble.
I was the oldest, so it was really my responsibility to get both of us on the bus on time in the morning. As much as I dreaded Trudy’s ire on the bus, I much more dreaded my moms. And of course she was upset, she now had to take her kids 20 minutes out of the way to school. I hated letting my mom down, and I felt like it was all my fault. I was a child. I know I was a teenager, but I was still a child. Why would stopping the bus and waiting less than 60 seconds for us to get down the hill to the bus stop put her late? Why were we the only kids she did that to? I witnessed on several occasions as other kids were given grace in leaving their house after she arrived at their driveway, and allowed to get on the bus. They weren’t waiting down at the road, but she waited for them, why would she not wait for us as we are clearly walking down? I couldn’t understand it, and in my naive understanding of justice I felt like she had a vendetta against me. In reality, she was probably not exactly happy in her position or maybe something in her personal life wasn’t going well, and she was taking it out on me and my brother. I am not justifying her behavior, but that is the only excuse I can come up with, as an adult myself, that she could possibly have for singling out me and my brother in the ways that she did.
Another way she would punish us is to make us wait to be dropped off. What I mean by that is all of us on our road lived on the left side. That means when we got picked up after she had turned around the door of the bus was facing our houses, but as we were being dropped off we had to cross in front of the bus. She would allow the other kids on our same street to get out and cross in front of the bus, but when it came to me and my brother it was a coin toss on if she would allow us the same courtesy or if she would make us wait as she drove to the turnaround spot, making us sit with her alone on the bus longer. Why? She would cite safety concerns having us crossing in front of her wasn’t safe. However, our bus had a bar that would come out where you had to walk out past it in order to cross in front, meaning she could see us no matter our size as we walked in front of the bus. And not to call me and my brother out, but we were never small kids. I have always been fat, and my brother was a chunk, and then he sprouted into a stringbean. There’s no way you could have missed us crossing in front of you. Another point, we were the oldest kids on the street. There were kids on our road that were small elementary children that were allowed to cross in front, yet these two high schoolers can’t? It was again the inconsistencies that she applied these rules that really upset me.
I have no way of proving it, but I swear to this day (even through an adult lens) that she singled us out especially hard on days where I was already having a rough day and was anti-social. If we didn’t say hello to her when we got on the bus she would do these tiny little things to continue to pester and bug us, like dropping us off after she turned around, forcing us to sit in silence, making us move up as kids got off the bus, etc.
As an adult I have worked with children in a brief capacity to the extent that she was in contact with us. I have never, and would never, single out children to torment just because they were having a bad day and I was interpreting that as having an attitude. I think she took my anti-social behaviors of wanting to be left alone, wanting to just sit in one spot and listen to my music, not wanting to be perceived as a personal attack to her, and she acted accordingly.
I often think of my experience with her as my bus driver as being similar to that of the Stanford Prison Experiment. If you are unfamiliar it was an experiment of a prison simulation that took place in 1971. Some participants were assigned as the “prisoners” and some were assigned as “guards” and then given free rein to act out this simulation. What ended up happening was the incredible abuse of power of the guards over the prisoners. How the guards suddenly viewed their fellow classmates as essentially animals, and abused them emotionally, and eventually physically. It showed that anyone given a little power in situational roles with certain personalities can cause trauma and harm. A lot of the prisoners had PTSD, while the guards struggled with regret and ashamed of how they acted in the experiment. Though it is widely criticized and controversial, with some calling into question the authenticity of the experiment, as someone that has been abused I completely believe in the outcome. I’m not trying to say that everyone given power will abuse it, there were even examples in the experiment where some of the guards were sympathetic towards the prisoners, smuggling things in for them, and even quitting the experiment because of how other guards were behaving. This shows the personality differences in my opinion.
Trudy was a middle-aged woman that was driving a school bus for a living. This is a very important job, and she was hired and left alone with us to do as she saw fit for hours a day. It has had lasting, lingering effects in my life to this day. There is a possibility she could read this, and honestly I hope she does. I hope in the time since she has grown as a person and has worked on her emotional regulation when it comes to interacting with children. Sometimes kids don’t want to talk. Sometimes they just want to rest, and the bus should be a safe space to do that. Especially if they were on as long as me and my brother were. Usually an hour and a half both ways, depending on if the route was full or not.
I also want her to know that I do forgive her for the harm she caused me. I internalized it, shoved it down, and tried to forget, but trauma always has a way of resurfacing. This is me acknowledging that harm, accepting how I felt, and making space for the feelings rising in me now as I write this. But I never want to see or speak to her again. I would simply like for us to go our separate ways, knowing that I am finally letting this go. I cannot continue to dwell on the injustices I faced at her hands. This is where I set it down.
